Treasure of the Rudras is a pretty wild ride all around. Highly recommend. Its 'lore' is VERY similar to what's going on in a massively popular series that came 10+ years later, and you will not be able to guess which one.
I've been playing a.... dragonball z game lately. Super Saiya Densetsu for the snes. I should lead off by saying that if you don't like dragonball, ignore the rest of this text. Wouldn't recommend this to someone who doesn't care about the series. It's... questionably programmed and the fan translation is iffy, but it's kind of amazing that it holds together at all. Battle system is card-based card with multiple items that manipulate cards/stats.
That isn't why it strikes me as atypical though, although the battle system is pretty unique. It's following the storyline of an anime, and normally such games are kinda strict, (this one is too in how you're 'supposed' to approach some major battles) but this one has a huge amount of variables and events that can play out in different ways. Like, depending on how you do in a certain minigame, Goku can arrive to the battle with Nappa and Vegeta either really early or really late. I think there's 7+ different 'times' he can show up. You can take Vegeta out before he turns into a monkey, all of the Z-fighters can survive and go to Namek, and you can even keep someone in Captain Ginyu's body after he does his body-switch technique. That last one's a glitch though. Oh, and like I said, the Z-fighters can survive, but they can also die at any time. And if they die, they're gone forever.
It's hard to describe, but basically it feels fairly unique in how 'loose' it feels, especially for an anime game. There's just a path the player can walk that's wider than normal, closer to a crpg than a jrpg.
